Top 75 Stirner's Quotes
#1. This will of Stirner's, this restless probing of all given knowledge, this endless questioning, and the continuous bending towards new understanding, ...
John Carroll
#2. The habit of the religious way of thinking has biased our mind so grievously that we are - terrified at ourselves in our nakedness and naturalness; it has degraded us so that we deem ourselves depraved by nature, born devils.
Max Stirner
#3. People is the name of the body, State of the spirit, of that ruling person that has hitherto suppressed me.
Max Stirner
#4. Freedom cannot be granted. It must be taken.
Max Stirner
#5. Thus the radii of all education run together into one center which is called personality.
Max Stirner
#6. The truth wears longer than all the gods; for it is only in the truth's service, and for love of it, that people have overthrown the gods and at last God himself. "The truth" outlasts the downfall of the world of gods, for it is the immortal soul of this transitory world of gods; it is Deity itself.
Max Stirner
#7. Man with the great M is only an ideal, the species only something thought of.
Max Stirner
#8. Ownership of thought depends on the thinker not subordinating himself to a 'ruling thought'. This is particularly difficult, argues Stirner, ... for language itself is a network of 'fixed ideas'. Truths emerge only when language is reworked and possessed individually.
John Carroll
#10. It is not recognized in the full amplitude of the word that all freedom is essentially self-liberation - that I can have only so much freedom as I procure for myself by my owness.
Max Stirner
#12. My power is my property. My power gives me property. My power am I myself, and through it am I my property.
Max Stirner
#13. Man, your head is haunted; you have wheels in your head! You imagine great things, and depict to yourself a whole world of gods that has an existence for you, a spirit-realm to which you suppose yourself to be called, an ideal that beckons to you. You have a fixed idea!
Max Stirner
#14. No knowledge, however thorough and extensive, no brilliance and perspicuity, no dialectic sophistication, will preserve us from the commmonness of thought and will. It is truly not the merit of the school if we do not come out selfish.
Max Stirner
#15. Might is a fine thing, and useful for many purposes; for "one goes further with a handful of might than with a bagful of right."
Max Stirner
#16. Then the necessary decline of non-voluntary learning and rise of the self-assured will which perfects itself in the glorious sunlight of the free person may be somewhat expressed as follows: knowledge must die and rise again as will and create itself anew each day as a free person.
Max Stirner
#17. We don't call it sin today, we call it self-expression.
Max Stirner
#18. Now why, if freedom is striven after for love of the I after all - why not choose the I himself as beginning, middle, and end?
Max Stirner
#19. Property exists by grace of the law. It is not a fact, but a legal fiction.
Max Stirner
#20. The young are of age when they twitter like the old; they are driven through school to learn the old song, and, when they have this by heart, they are declared of age.
Max Stirner
#22. Now it is clear, God cares only for what is his, busies himself only with himself, thinks only of himself, and has only himself before his eyes; woe to all that is not well pleasing to him. He serves no higher person, and satisfies only himself. His cause is - a purely egoistic cause.
Max Stirner
#23. Man has not really vanquished Shamanism and its spooks till he possesses the strength to lay aside not only the belief in ghosts or in spirits, but also the belief in the spirit.
Max Stirner
#24. Whoever will be free must make himself free. Freedom is no fairy gift to fall into a man's lap. What is freedom? To have the will to be responsible for one's self.
Max Stirner
#25. The object of the state is always the same: to limit the individual, to tame him, to subordinate him, to subjugate him.
Max Stirner
#26. Here we come upon the old, old craze of the world, which has not yet learned to do without clericalism
that to live and work *for an idea*is man's calling, and according to the faithfulness its fulfilment his *human worth* is measured
Max Stirner
#27. Every State is a despotism, be the despot one or many.
Max Stirner
#28. When one is anxious only to live, he easily, in this solicitude, forgets the enjoyment of life. If his only concern is for life, and he thinks "if I only have my dear life," he does not apply his full strength to using, i. e., enjoying, life.
Max Stirner
#29. For Stirner, the social axiom of conservative, liberal, and socialist schools of political thought alike is in itself repressive: it disguises as potentially redemptive an order whose central function is inhibitory of the individual's interests.
John Carroll
#30. Therefore there is only one form of freedom for Stirner, "my power," and only
one truth, "the magnificent egotism of the stars.
Albert Camus
#31. What matters the party to me? I shall find enough anyhow who unite with me without swearing allegiance to my flag.
Max Stirner
#32. Revolution is aimed at new arrangements; insurrection leads us no longer to let ourselves be arranged, but to arrange ourselves, and set no glittering hope on institutions
Max Stirner
#33. [M]an has as much liberty as he is willing to take.
Emma Goldman
#34. Moral spontaneity" corresponds entirely with "religious and orthodox philosophy", "constitutional monarchy", "the Christian state", "freedom with certain limits", or in a figure, to the hero fetters to a sick bed.
Max Stirner
#36. Yes, yes, children must early be made to practise piety, godliness, and propriety; a person of good breeding is one into whom 'good maxims' have been instilled and impressed, poured in through a funnel, thrashed in and preached in.
Max Stirner
#37. It would be foolish to assert that there is no power above mine. Only the attitude that I take toward it will be quite another than that of the religious age: I shall be the enemy of every higher power, while religion teaches us to make it our friend and be humble toward it.
Max Stirner
#38. Apart from any other basis which might justify a superiority, education, as a power, raised him who possessed it over the weak, who lacked it, and the educated man counted in his circle, however large or small it was, as the mighty, the powerful, the imposing one: for he was an authority.
Max Stirner
#39. Protestantism has actually put a man in the position of a country governed by secret police. The spy and eavesdropper, 'conscience,' watches over every motion of the mind, and all thought and action is for it a 'matter of conscience,' i.e. police business.
Max Stirner
#40. If man is to remain the creator and master of his world then, Stirner maintains, ... all that has been accepted, that has taken on the secure guise of the 'fact', must be return to a state of flux, or be rejected.
John Carroll
#42. Stirner and Nietzsche ... reveal how prone morality is to being used as a means of rationalization, a cloak for concealing violent and brutish passions, and making their sadistic expression a virtue.
John Carroll
#43. [Marx] explicates ideology as socially determined, [Stirner] as psychologically determined: both accuse it of remaining oblivious to its own determinations.
John Carroll
#44. The divine is God's concern; the human, man's. My concern is neither the divine nor the human, not the true, good, just, free, etc., but solely what is 'mine,' and it is not a general one, but is - 'unique,' as I am unique. Nothing is more to me than myself!
Max Stirner
#45. Before the sacred, people lost all sense of power and all confidence; they occupy a powerless and humble attitude toward it. And yet no thing is sacred of itself, but by declaring it sacred, by my declaration, my judgment, my bending the knee; in short, by my - conscience.
Max Stirner
#47. The state calls its own violence law, but that of the individual, crime.
Max Stirner
#48. What I have in my power, that is my own. So long as I assert myself as holder, I am the proprietor of the thing.
Max Stirner
#49. If the child has not an object that it can occupy itself with, it feels ennui; for it does not yet know how to occupy itself with itself.
Max Stirner
#50. Religion itself is without genius. There is no religious genius and no one would be permitted to distinguish between the talented and the untalented in religion.
Max Stirner
#52. Christianity has aimed to deliver us from a life determined by nature, from the appetites as actuating us, and so has meant that man should not let himself be determined by appetites.
Max Stirner
#53. Liberty of the people is not my liberty!
Max Stirner
#54. He who is infatuated with 'Man' leaves persons out of account so far as that infatuation extends, and floats in an ideal, sacred interest. Man, you see, is not a person, but an ideal, a spook.
Max Stirner
#55. The State practices "violence," the individual must not do so. The state's behavior is violence, and it calls its violence "law"; that of the individual, "crime".
Max Stirner
#56. One is not worthy to have what one, through weakness, lets be taken from him; one is not worthy of it because one is not capable of it.
Max Stirner
#57. Is not all the stupid chatter of most of our newspapers the babble of fools who suffer from the fixed idea of morality, legality, christianity and so forth, and only seem to go about free because the madhouse in which they walk takes in so broad a space?
Max Stirner
#58. A race of altruists is necessarily a race of slaves. A race of free men is necessarily a race of egoists.
Max Stirner
#59. Let us look and see, then, how they manage their concerns - they for whose cause we are to labour, devote ourselves, and grow enthusiastic.
Max Stirner
#60. We do not aspire to communal life but to a life apart.
Max Stirner
#61. If it is right for me, it is right. It is possible that it is wrong for others: let them take care of themselves!
Max Stirner
#62. The freedom of man is, in political liberalism, freedom from persons, from personal dominion, from the master; the securing of each individual person against other persons, personal freedom.
Max Stirner
#63. For only he who is alive is in the right.
Max Stirner
#64. From the moment when he catches sight of the light of the world, a man seeks to find out himself and get hold of himself out of its confusion, in which he, with everything else, is tossed about in motley mixture.
Max Stirner
#65. The people's good fortune is my misfortune!
Max Stirner
#66. The moral man is necessarily narrow in that he knows no other enemy than the 'immoral' man. 'He who is not moral is immoral!' and accordingly reprobate, despicable, etc. Therefore, the moral man can never comprehend the egoist.
Max Stirner
#67. The men of the future will yet fight their way to many a liberty that we do not even miss.
Max Stirner
#68. He who must expend his life to prolong life cannot enjoy it, and he who is still seeking for his life does not have it and can as little enjoy it.
Max Stirner
#69. Whoso is full of sacred (religious, moral, humane) love loves only the spook, the "true man," and persecutes with dull mercilessness the individual, the real man.
Max Stirner
#70. Whoever knows how to take, to defend, the thing, to him belongs property.
Max Stirner
#71. For there is nothing more serious than a lunatic when he comes to the central point of his lunacy.
Max Stirner
#72. It is possible I can make very little of myself; but this little is everything, and better than what I allow to be made out of me by the might of others, by the training of custom, religion, the laws, the State.
Max Stirner
#73. Only the free and personal man is a good citizen (realist), and even with the lack of particular (scholarly, artistic, etc)culture, a tasteful judge (humanist).
Max Stirner
#75. Whoever is a complete person does not need to be an authority.
Max Stirner
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